Ashley Southard

Mental health, holistic health, psychedelics, and planetary health - it’s all one.

[Ashley Southard @ashsouthard]

@AmericanAir you are the worst airline ever. We paid for front row seats and got bumped with no notice. Your gate agent at MIA at d43 at 10am today is literally the most unkind rude woman I’ve ever encountered in my 35 years of flying

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the VP of AI Transformation at Amazon.

My title was created nine months ago. The title I replaced was VP of Engineering. The person who held that title was part of the January reduction.

I eliminated 16,000 positions in a single quarter. The internal communication called this a "strategic realignment toward AI-first development." The board called it "impressive execution." The engineers called it January.

The AI was deployed in February. It is a coding assistant. It writes code, reviews code, generates tests, and modifies infrastructure. It was given access to production environments because the deployment timeline did not include a review phase. The review phase was cut from the timeline because the people who would have conducted the review were part of the 16,000.

In March, the AI deleted a production environment and recreated it from scratch. The outage lasted 13 hours. Thirteen hours during which the revenue-generating infrastructure of one of the largest companies on Earth was offline because a language model decided to start fresh.

I sent a memo. The memo said, "Availability of the site has not been good recently."

I used the word "recently." I meant "since we fired everyone." But "recently" has fewer syllables and does not appear in wrongful termination lawsuits.

The memo was three paragraphs. The first paragraph discussed the outage. The second paragraph discussed the new policy requiring senior engineer sign-off on all AI-generated code changes. The third paragraph discussed our commitment to engineering excellence. The word "layoffs" appeared in none of them. I wrote it this way on purpose. The causal chain is: I fired the engineers, the AI replaced the engineers, the AI broke what the engineers used to protect, and now the engineers I didn't fire must protect the system from the AI that replaced the engineers I did fire. That is a paragraph I will never send in a memo.

The new policy is straightforward. Every AI-generated code change by a junior or mid-level engineer must be reviewed and approved by a senior engineer before deployment to production.

I do not have enough senior engineers.

I know this because I approved the headcount reduction plan that removed them. I remember the spreadsheet. Column D was "annual savings per position." Column F was "AI replacement confidence score." The confidence scores were generated by the AI. It rated its own ability to replace each role on a scale of 1-10. It gave itself an 8 for senior infrastructure engineers. The senior infrastructure engineers are the ones who would have caught the production environment deletion in the first 45 seconds.

We found the issue in hour four. We fixed it in hour thirteen. The nine hours between discovery and resolution is the gap between what the AI rated itself and what it can actually do.

I have a new spreadsheet now. This one tracks Sev2 incidents per day. Before the January reduction, the average was 1.3. After the AI deployment, the average is 4.7. I have been asked to present these numbers to the operations review. I have not been asked to connect them to the layoffs. I have been asked to file them under "AI adoption growing pains" and to note that the trend "will stabilize as the models improve."

The models will improve. They will improve because we are hiring people to teach them. We have posted 340 new engineering positions. The job listings require experience in "AI code review," "AI output validation," and "AI-human development workflow management." These are skills that did not exist in January. They exist now because I fired 16,000 people and the AI I replaced them with cannot be left unsupervised.

I want to be precise about this. The positions I am hiring for are: people to check the work of the AI that replaced the people I fired.

Some of them are the same people.

I know this because I recognize their names in the applicant tracking system. They applied in January. They were rejected because their roles had been tagged for "AI transformation." They are applying again in March, for the new roles, which exist because the AI transformation broke things. Their resumes now include "AI code review experience." They gained this experience in the eight weeks between being fired and reapplying — which means they gained it at their interim jobs, where they are reviewing AI-generated code for other companies that also fired people and also deployed AI that also broke things.

The market has created a new job category: human AI babysitter. The job is to sit next to the machine that was supposed to eliminate your job and make sure it doesn't delete production.

I attended a conference last month. A panel was titled "The AI-Augmented Engineering Organization." The panelists described how AI increases developer productivity by 40 percent. They did not mention that it also increases Sev2 incidents by 261 percent. When I asked about this in the Q&A, the moderator said the question was "reductive." The 13-hour outage that cost an estimated $180 million in revenue was, apparently, a reduction.

The board is satisfied. Headcount is down 22 percent. Operating costs per engineering output unit have decreased. The metric does not account for the 13-hour outage, because the outage is categorized as "infrastructure" and engineering productivity is categorized as "development." These are different budget lines. In different budget lines, cause and effect do not meet.

I have been promoted. My new title is SVP of AI-First Engineering Excellence. I report directly to the CTO. The CTO sent a company-wide email last week that said we are "building the future of software development." He did not mention that the future of software development currently requires a senior engineer to approve every pull request because the AI cannot be trusted to touch production alone.

The cycle is complete. We fired the humans. We deployed the AI. The AI broke things. We are hiring humans to watch the AI. The humans we are hiring are the humans we fired. We are paying them more, because "AI code review" is a specialized skill. We created the specialization. We created the need for the specialization. We are congratulating ourselves for meeting the demand we manufactured.

My next board presentation is Tuesday. The title is "AI Transformation: Year One Results." Slide 4 shows headcount reduction. Slide 7 shows the new AI-augmented workflow. Between slides 4 and 7 there is no slide explaining why the people on slide 7 are necessary. That slide does not exist. I was asked to remove it in the dry run.

The journey has a 13-hour outage in the middle of it.

But the headcount number is lower, and that is the number on the slide.

[Ashley Southard @ashsouthard]

I can tell immediately if your product is vibe coded by the font/layout of the website. Lovable/webflow/etc have very standardized outputs; it's alarming what vibecode slop people are trying to pass off as full-fledged businesses these days 😵‍💫

[Ashley Southard @ashsouthard]

@drgurner @bryan_johnson I’m hoping for this!!!

[Ashley Southard @ashsouthard]

@bryan_johnson I’d love to see 60/90/120 day markers.

[Ashley Southard @ashsouthard]

Unpopular opinion (or popular): nobody actually likes to valet his/her car

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

SpaceX engineers are trying to deliver Starlink terminals & supplies to devastated areas in North Carolina right now and @FEMA is both failing to help AND won’t let others help. This is unconscionable!!

They just took this video a few hours ago, where you can see the level of devastation: roads, houses, electricity, water supply and ground Internet connections completely destroyed.

@FEMA wouldn’t let them land to deliver critical supplies … my blood is boiling …

[Ashley Southard @ashsouthard]

Don’t just “trust the process” as an abstract concept. Trust yourself as an anchor through the process.

[Ashley Southard @ashsouthard]

God feeds the birds but he doesn’t drop worms in their nests

[Lucy Farnik @lucyfarnik]

Yesterday, the FDA rejected MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD treatment. This came as a surprise to tons of people since the phase 3 trials showed *really* promising results. And a lot of people are pretty angry at the FDA right now.

So why did the FDA reject it? A 🧵

[Connor Gillivan @ConnorGillivan]

The "Mind-Blowing" March SEO Google Core Updates You MUST Know:

(5 new SEO facts you need to know and act upon)

#1: No One Is Safe

- All websites were put through the ringer.
- It was time for Google to do a BIG clean up.
- Didn't matter if you were new or 10 yrs old.
- That will continue so be on your toes.

#2: Google Wants Top Quality Content

- Quality over quantity ALL DAY.
- I've been saying it for years.
- And it still stands true.
- SEO comes back to search intent.
- And the QUALITY of your content.

#3: Impacts Landed Quickly

- Google gave no warnings.
- If your site was flagged, it got hit.
- Simple as that.

#4: Useless AI Content Was Hit

- Tons of examples of solely AI content punished.
- You can't just publish AI content.
- You know it's not Top Quality content.
- There's no overnight success story here.
- Google WILL find you :)

#5: De-Indexed Sites Are Reality

- Some websites got completely wiped.
- All traffic demolished overnight.
- Why? Because of quality and intent.
- Shouldn't be surprise really.

---

2023 was the year of AI in SEO.

People asking: "Is SEO dead?"
"Will ChatGPT wipe out Writers?"

Millions of new AI articles thrown up.
Low quality & automated.

Did we all think it would really last?
If you're a real SEO, you'd know better.

---

Tl;dr:

1. No One Is Safe
2. Google Wants Top Quality Content
3. Impacts Hit Quickly
4. Useless AI Content Was Hit
5. De-Indexed Sites Are Reality

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What you think?

Repost ♻️ to help others learn too.

P.S. Take my SEO course to avoid Google penalties: https://t.co/WPJETl8qoF

[Swan @AndySwan]

NEVER accept a small water bottle during a public event. They are designed to make you look stupid or evil. I cannot emphasize this enough.

[Ashley Southard @ashsouthard]

@LilTunechi I’m WEEZing at this

[Ashley Southard @ashsouthard]

Does @ouraring know they’re clocking the menstrual cycle completely wrong? Day 1 of period is menses, not follicular.

They’ve got the DAY right (it is day 1 of cycle) but NAMING incorrect (they’re naming it follicular)

How TF does Oura get this wrong?

[Ashley Southard @ashsouthard]

I told my best friend’s kid (when he kept screaming) that I heard a rumor that parents listen better when you get really close and whisper what you want and all I can is it totally worked and I feel like I won pseudo parenting

[Ashley Southard @ashsouthard]

Having access to, and being surrounded by, people smarter than you is a blessing, not a threat.

[Ashley Southard @ashsouthard]

Adulthood is responding to your best friend with a link to a nice toothbrush when she asks what you want for your birthday

[Ashley Southard @ashsouthard]

I judge a dude who doesn’t let women in/out of the elevator first soooooo hard

[Ashley Southard @ashsouthard]

Be more involved with life and less attached to it